


If I Had You

by Hectopascal



Series: Blood and Family [1]
Category: Pitch Black (2000), Riddick (2013), The Chronicles of Riddick Series, The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-26
Updated: 2014-07-26
Packaged: 2018-02-10 14:08:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2027943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hectopascal/pseuds/Hectopascal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack hasn't always been Jack. The name comes first. She finds the person later.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If I Had You

*

It’s an outpost planet the girl and her family lives on. Everything, from the soil to the sky to the air, had been terraformed two generations back to make the surface of a far off floating rock habitable.

All the colonists who live there are farmers. They grow basic crops mostly because supply drops are rare and the starter up ration packs run out faster than they should. The excess they keep to sell in better and brighter systems when the infrequent convoy ship passes by.

The tiny town the people scrape together also functions as the occasional base for a crew of thieves who are fair when they trade, which is more than can be said for the merchants.

It’s a hard life on the outpost planets. Hard, but it is a life.

The girl hates it.

She hates the gravity, another class up from what she is used to, and how it makes everything difficult, breathing and walking and especially working.

She hates the fake taste to the air, oxygen passing her tongue and leaving a chemical aftertaste behind. It’s disgusting.

She hates the grass, yellow and brittle when it isn’t red and sharp. Unnatural. She hates how she can’t walk around barefoot anymore without risking stinging cuts.

She hates the water, how it looks fine but smells funny and made her stomach cramp for a whole month when they first came.

She hates the people, beaten down and trudging through day to day living without being alive.

She hates that her parents haven’t laughed, really laughed, not just an exhausted huff of air, for longer than she cares to think about.

She hates, most of all, the sickness that poverty-ridden society breeds like rats. The sickness that takes hold in the chest and fills it up with liquid until you can’t breathe but for the hacking coughs trying to get it out, out, _out_.

She hates it all with every fiber of her being.

Her youngest brother dies of the sickness, so small and tiny and helpless and still just a baby, too young to know what’s happening. His name was Brian. They bury him in the yard and the headstone marking the grave is bigger than he was.

It makes the girl laugh, sometimes. It makes her cry. It makes her rage at the unfairness of it all.

Her oldest brother dies in the fields. The sun is hot that day and it kills him and no one knows why for certain. He falls down, red faced and wheezing, and never gets back up. His name was Luke. They bury him in the yard too.

The girl thinks absently, with tears streaming down her face, that they’ll have to rope the area off soon and call it a family cemetery. Make it official like. They won’t be the first colonists to do it. Probably won’t be the last either.

Her oldest sister takes off the next time the thieves come back, her face grim and determined. She says she wants more than this, this farm, this life, this constant looming entropy. She says she’s going into the black. She says she’ll write.

She doesn’t.

Distantly, the girl knows why. Understands. Accepts it. She wistfully dreams that she had gone too and never come back.

They put a stone down for Elise even though there is nothing beneath it. They don’t have a body and the fair group of thieves don’t come back to roost at their little town again. It may be for the best.

The sickness takes the girl’s second youngest brother the following winter. She sobs so hard she makes herself sick because she has no more brothers, no more sister, no more siblings at all.

 _Joseph,_ she cries, _please don’t go, please don’t leave me._

She’s an only child now and she doesn’t like being alone. Hates it actually. Just like she hates the whole damn planet and her parents too, a little, for bringing them all here to die.

She needs to be stronger than this, if she wants to survive, because she wonders if she might be next and the mere thought of another plain grey stone in that sad, sad row with _her_ name on it makes her ill.

She’s wrong. For all that she suspects, she isn’t next.

Rope is an amazingly useful thing in their lives. They need it. Depend on it, like they depend on the plow and their seeds.

The girl never wants to look at it again after she steps into their home one day and finds her mother hanging from the ceiling with rope digging into her neck. Her face is blotchy and red and purple, her tongue black and swollen, her eyes bulging with private horror, and flies are already beginning to gather around her head.

The girl opens her mouth to scream and nothing comes out. She stays there, transfixed, until her father finds them both. He bellows like a wounded animal at the sight of his wife, all pain and hurt, and the girl speculates why it is that she isn’t crying when even her strong Papa sheds tears freely.

Maybe because she isn’t sad anymore. The crushing ache of sorrow eases with time, but now it’s transition to something else is almost instant. Like the click-click-click of the lock on their door.

Click. Take the pain out. Click. Twist it hard until it’s unrecognizable. Click. Pour burning anger back in.

Anger is better than sorrow, better than pain. Anger, the girl is convinced, is better than everything. She can scarcely recall what genuine easy happiness feels like. She’s not sure she ever wants to remember.

The newest stone at the end of the row reads, Hope. It does nothing but provide further evidence that there is no God.

Her father doesn’t pray anymore. Neither does the girl. The family bible is shoved in a drawer and all but forgotten entirely. They used to believe that sinners, that those who do evil, go to hell, where they burn for all eternity.

But suicide is a terrible sin.

The girl refuses to belief that her mother is burning. She point blank rejects the whole idea and her faith dies quietly, buried in the loose amber dirt along with the woman who bore her. Who had loved her, even if it hadn’t been enough to live for. Even if _she_ hadn’t been enough. That’s fine. Truly.

But…the girl finds out shortly that her father is not fine with it. He’s so far from it in fact that he might as well be in a different galaxy.

The girl watches him sway and doesn’t know how to help, watches him spiral into drink and can’t make him stop when he goes too far, watches him fall and can do nothing but that—watch.

The alcohol they have on the outpost planets is all homemade, as strong and sweet as the maker desires it to be. The most popular type is called Starshine, transparent as water but tinted gold. It sparkles in the sun like a priceless liquefied jewel. The fumes it gives off are so potent, the girl gets dizzy just sniffing them.

She finds her father in the bath, swimming in Starshine, cold and dead. It smells so strongly that she can barely stand to go near him, but he is family so she does. She discovers that she has the power to, alone, drag her father’s corpse from the tub, dig him a final resting place, and give him a proper burial.

It takes hours for her to get the hole big enough. More effort still to heave him through the house and then into it. It takes time to cover him with dirt until the scent of Starshine is faint and the ground is only slightly uneven. Time to take a knife to a plain grey stone and carve his name out of the rock.

She’s worked herself raw by the end of the whole business, blisters oozing on the palm of her hands and dirt crusted under her nails. Her fingers are sore. So is her back, her arms, her neck, her legs, and her heart.

Her heart is the worst of it. It aches with a fierceness that is almost enough to break through the apathy.

She is alone.

It’s a steady mantra running through her mind as she sits in front of a row of six stones and watches the sun come up with crusty uncaring eyes. _Alone._ They’ve all gone and left her alone.

_What now?_

The girl is only a girl and she knows it. She had done work for her family ( _with her family_ , a traitorous voice whispers. _Shut up, shut up_ , she tells it) but it had been chores, menial labor, boring things anybody could do.

She needs…a job? She can’t manage the farm by herself and someone would surely stop her if she tried. But who would hire her among the colonists here? They all have families of their own, too many mouths to feed, and there is no helpful group of outlaws for her to run off with.

She is thirteen and alone. Thirteen and afraid. Thirteen and not stupid and in two weeks she’ll be fourteen. Fourteen, which is a perfectly reasonable marrying age. Someone might take her for that, if nothing else, but no, not even now, would she _ever_ …

Just no. Not a chance in hell.

She’d run first. She’d run so far and fast that no one would catch her until she vanished among people who didn’t know her face.

…she can run.

Her heart picks up, a thread of excitement making her hands shake. She can run, of course, she hates this place and everyone on this backwater planet and if she never sees hide or hair of them again it will be too soon.

But…

She looks at the stones, neat in a row, orderly like death isn’t. _Brian, Luke, Elise, Joseph, Hope_ , and last, still rough around the edges, the letters unweathered and jagged, _Jack._

Who will be here for them if she goes?

Who will remember that Brian had the sweetest laugh? That his entire belly went into it until he shook and gasped and snorted snot bubbles like only a baby, ignorant of everything, can make? Who will look at his stone and think of the time he managed to catch a grasshopper in his chubby fist and almost ate it before Elise noticed? Who will remember his gummy, toothless, smile?

And Luke, who had been strong enough to pick her up and swing her round and round in air even when she got near as big as he was, what about him? Who will remember his grumpy face, so put-upon when asked to do anything, before he inevitably caved like the softy he was? Who will remember that he made the best flapjacks and cornbread and tomato soup?

Who will remember Elise, whose body was never buried right, whose soul they tried to lay to rest? Her, with her shiny black hair that the girl had loved to run her fingers through and braid and play with. Elise, who taught her to catch frogs back when they lived somewhere where there were frogs and liked to run barefoot through the mud, letting the wind catch her magnificent hair and throw it behind her like a cape?

What about Joseph, the little brother she hadn’t liked much, but loved nonetheless? So loud, so obnoxious all the time, especially when he shouldn’t have been. Her stupid little brother who hadn’t understood what it is to mourn. Him, with his stick figures, running after her always asking to play a game, _c’mon, just this once, it’ll be fun, please?_

Hope and Jack. Mama and Papa. Mother and Father. Gone. Their loss had been greater somehow, their presence so vital to the girl’s existence that their absence feels cold against her skin, like the sun had been snuffed out.

How can she abandon what’s left of them? No one else knows them as she does. No one else will even _care._

It makes her angry and the anger is familiar, comforting. It helps her think.

The realization comes slowly as the sun climbs higher in the sky—the white hot circle a bane at the best of times, it blinds her now. Her family won’t care either. They’re dead.

It’s a fact. It doesn’t hurt like the girl thinks it should, actually, it doesn’t hurt at all. They are dead and the dead care for nothing, but she—the last one alive—does. She cares too much about six stones but she won’t let that, her own weakness, stop her from doing what she needs to do.

The girl stands and makes a token effort to brush the dry clingy soil from her loose dress. Then she goes back inside the house and determinedly does not look at the damp path where she hauled her father’s body from the bathroom to the door, stepping over it on her way to the kitchen where she will make herself a light breakfast because she is hungry and there is no reason why she should not eat.

And, while she opens the pantry and prepares a meal, she plans.

*

She doesn’t leave the kitchen except to find a paper and pencil, which she uses to make a list and organize concepts that still remain vague in her head.

Her father and mother used to make lists, when they went to town, when they wrote down assignments, so everyone would know what was what and what to get and what to do. With a list, a concrete strategy, things seemed to go smoother. So…the girl makes a list.

It’s more accurate to say that she writes things down so that she can examine them more closely and to be sure that she doesn’t forget anything.

There are some questions: _Where do I go? How am I going to get there? What should I bring with me?_

She finds acceptable answers for none of them. There is _away_ and _by any means necessary_ and _what I can carry_ which is really not extremely helpful.

*

She throws the paper away, deciding that she doesn’t want anything connecting her to this place.

Not even a name.

She goes out and finds a plain grey stone, starts to carve.

*

She doesn’t bother to clean up, leaves a mess in the kitchen and chips of rock on the floor and long strands of mud brown hair in the sink.

She uses scissors to crop her hair close to her skull because she has a flash of brilliance inspired by fear and paranoia, thinks of baby-making and force and other bad things and steels herself with a solid, _no._

The deception will work. Her chest hasn’t grown in yet and her face isn’t overly feminine—her mother had tweaked her nose once and called her comely, but that had been a lie—but she bleeds already so perhaps that will change in the future. At least the last is simple enough to hide.

Without her hair, the girl decides, examining herself critically in the only mirror, she can pass as a gangly boy. She tilts her head to the side, considering. A gangly boy with something funny going on in his cheeks because they look a bit…off somehow, too sharp. Maybe, if anyone sees, they’ll just attribute that to hunger.

She wears her own shorts because they fit and takes one of Luke’s old shirts because it’s still big on her even though she has grown even after he stopped. She finds her father’s old cap, the one he’d worn when he worked outside in the hot summer months and stuffs it on her strangely light head, then shoves her feet into her battered shoes.

Good as it’s going to get.

She takes all the money she squirrels out—unfortunately, not much—and crams it down deep in her pockets so it won’t fall out.

She takes the stone she’d left sitting on the kitchen table beside her breakfast dishes and carries it outside where she places it gently at the end of a row of very similar rocks.

Then, taking a deep breath, she looks at all of them one more time, turns her back, and walks away.

*

Seven plain grey stones all in a row. It’s a quaint story, the whole family together and at peace. There is nothing beneath two of them, but the casual observer won’t know that and won’t care to think differently.

In order, they read: _Brian, Luke, Elise, Joseph, Hope, Jack,_ and last of them all is, _Audrey_.

It’s nice, the girl thinks, fitting.

Because she isn’t going to be that person anymore. That person, Audrey, dies with the rest of them.

*

It takes her three days to get out. She doesn’t speak to anyone but herself the entire time, practices pitching her voice lower, huskier, and waits, hoping for a break.

She bribes her way onto the next ship that passes by. It takes most of her funds and the so-called Captain tells her to sleep in the cargo hold amongst crates that emit rather peculiar sounds. She doesn’t mind.

No one asks her for a name. Good, since she doesn’t have one yet.

They all leave her alone. She isn’t sure if it’s because she’s pretending to be a boy or if they just don’t care, but she’s not willing to take the risk. Aside from mealtimes, which are served communally, she doesn’t interact or speak with anyone.

It’s probably for the best. She’ll take loneliness and solitude for safety any day.

*

She feels less charitable towards Captain Hawkins—has to be a fake name—when he kicks her out when they dock at a market to sell their (probably illegal) load.

“Jackass,” she snarls as he hauls her down the ramp with a fist wrapped tight around her shirt collar because a boy won’t take this kind of thing lying down and she won’t either by God. She struggles, trying to bite, and gets thumped soundly on the head for her trouble.

“Go on,” Hawkins grumbles, turning her loose. She stumbles and falls and her face burns with embarrassment and she hadn’t wanted to stay forever, but she hadn’t yet prepared herself mentally to leave.

“Fuck you,” she mumbles, hands fisting on the ground, feeling a helpless swell of abandonment and frustration. Why does it have to be so _hard_ on her own? “I paid—”

“For a ride off your shithole of a planet,” Hawkins interrupts. “Which I provided, generously. If you want to keep your place on my ship for any length farther, I think twenty cells would serve as compensation.”

She doesn’t have twenty, doesn’t even have ten. The fare Hawkins had demanded to let her step foot on his ship had almost cleaned her out.

The girl pushes herself up, sniffs hard, and bares her teeth. She thinks _I don’t need you._ Then she tells him, “I don’t want a ride on a floating pile of garbage anyway. It looks like it’ll drop out of the sky if you kick it too hard. I think I’ll take my business elsewhere.”

Hawkins doesn’t look offended. “You do that, girlie.”

She’s too wound up in knots to realize it at once, but as Hawkins’ eyebrow rises, her face goes pale.

“What are you talkin’ about?” she blusters, talking too fast, she knows, nearly stammering. “I’m not a girl.”

“Sure. Course you aren’t. Might want to lighten up on the voice then, _boy_. You sound ridiculous.” Hawkins appears entirely unaffected by her, by everything. “And I’d take you farther out of pity—”

The girl’s teeth grind.

“—but my first is a superstitious bastard. Worth his weight in gold though. So,” Hawkins surveys her, eyes uncompromising but not wholly unsympathetic. “Run along now. Try the port on the other side of the city.”

What port? How is she supposed to buy a ticket with no money or can she stowaway, can she—?

“Well? Go on.”

She goes. But not before spitting at his feet and cursing his name because despite the shred of mercy, he’s still an asshole.

*

She gets lost.

It’s typical.

Then she gets hungry.

She wonders, tiredly, holding two cells and staring mournfully at a street vendor selling sweet buns, if this is how her life is going to be from now on. Setback piled on misery dropped on betrayal, all mixed together with disgust and depression and an empty ache yearning to be filled.

Could be. She hopes not, and buys a sweet bun with the last of her money and a bottle of water too. Makes a wish as she does it for all that a business transaction is not a shooting star and ignoring the fact that she doesn’t believe in that kind of thing anyways.

It isn’t enough.

Her stomach gurgles in protest. Still hungry.

She licks the remains of the bun off her fingers, chasing the last morsels of food with a desperation she hadn’t thought herself capable of, but can’t taste anything but engine oil and dirt and skin. Not sweet at all.

*

There are five ships in the port on the other side of town, which the girl does eventually locate.

Two of them look, if possible, even less space-worthy than Hawkins’ _Squall_. Not so much a vessel as a mismatched hodgepodge of metal welded together and hammered into a vaguely familiar shape. Neither inspire much confidence.

It turns out that three of the five aren’t going towards civilization at all, but headed out into deep space. One of the three is also one of the garbage heaps.

One is promising. It’s destination—from what the girl learns from eavesdropping on gossiping crewmates—is Regulus Sexta, which isn’t the _most_ popular trading planet, known for their markets and astounding selection of goods, but it’s close.

She can easily vanish there and never be found.

Unfortunately, the ship itself appears to be impregnable and there’s no easy way to sneak onboard, lie low until takeoff, and then do some fast talking so she doesn’t wind up jettisoned through the air lock like junk.

She’s got no money for bribes, no money for anything really, but she’ll make it work. Somehow.

She casts another longing glance at the gleaming hull and leaves to find a quiet unoccupied hole to sleep it over in. She’ll use the night and the free hours it gives her to think of something.

*

The next day the ship is gone.

The girl hadn’t been on it when it left.

_Shit._

*

That night it rains. Only a drizzle at first and the girl just grumbles and pulls an abandoned plastic poncho from a garbage can, wraps it around her shivering frame, and tries to go back to sleep.

Then it pours, rain coming down so hard it feels like solid pellets instead of drops of water, hard enough to bruise, thick enough to drown. Fast enough that soon puddles swell into rivers and streams that consume the streets and wash away anything not fixed to the ground.

There is no escaping from it. The poncho is worse than useless. The awnings over shops—meager protection—have been occupied by local gangs and other street kids who aren’t inclined to share.

The girl sits in two inches of water that keeps getting deeper. The sheets of rain around her are so thick that she can’t see or hear anything but the roar of an ocean dropping on her head. She’s wet down to the bone.

The wind rages and sucks all heat the water hasn’t managed to steal yet and the rain does an abrupt change of direction and smacks her full in the face before she can turn away.

There is no shelter. No relief. It goes on and on and on.

She is so miserable that she cries, wails actually at the unfairness of it all like a whining child, but she can’t make herself stop. Really can’t. It’s never happened to her before and nobody hears, thank the Lord. The rain muffles her sobs even as it coats her tongue and plasters her short hair flat against her head.

When is enough really enough? She’s afraid the answer is never.

She wonders, as she blinks and hides her head in her arms, knees drawn up to her chest, if _this_ is what the real world is like.

She comes to the conclusion, swallowing the water that’s always getting in her mouth because she doesn’t have the option of spitting it out, that if it is then the world sucks ass.

*

The rain stops, but the girl remains wet and uncomfortable for hours. She wishes she could just shrug her clothes off because the water clings to them, heavy and dragging, but knows how bad an idea it is.

Shortly after she resigns herself to shivering constantly and getting used to the background music of her chattering teeth, she almost loses her shoes to a boy who thinks they’d fit better on him.

“Your shoes,” he says, sneering and showing off dreadfully crooked teeth. “Give ‘em to me.”

The girl stares dully at him, thinks that this cannot be happening only it is. The most she can manage is a shaky, “N-no.”

He pulls a short knife, waving it threateningly. His teeth flash as he speaks, a crusty yellow. “Give ‘em to me now or I’ll cut you.”

“Go to h-hell,” the girl stammers through her shuddering and then she hits him in the forehead with a block of wood she spies submerged in a puddle.

It’s more a lucky shot than any skill, but it works—the boy staggers and falls, blood leaking sluggishly from a gash just above his eyebrow—and she kicks the knife out of his loose grip.

Then, because neither her mother nor her father raised a fool, she hits him again to make sure he stays down.

He moans as she searches his pockets, finding wet fabric, three single cells, and another rusty blade as thin as the first one.

Not altogether very helpful.

The girl pauses and purses her lips. Thinks of backup plans and hidey holes and safety through deceit. She checks the boy’s shoes and finds, beneath a sopping sock, a twenty cell chip, and beneath the other, a ten cell chip.

“Thanks, man.” She pats the now silent would-be thief on the head and her fingers come away red. It only bothers her a little, something novel taking root in the back of her head, something strong and fresh.

A savage new idea for this brutal, miserable new world: _Might makes right._

She nods to herself. True, or thereabouts.

*

There’s a new ship at the docks the next time the girl checks. It’s bigger than the others, old and sturdy. Dependable. She can use some dependability in the worst way. This, this will be her way out. For sure.

The Captain is nice, gullible in a way she hadn’t realized grownups could be. He believes her when she says that she is going to meet family, that for her birthday she is being allowed to travel by herself for the first time because she is finally old enough.

He laughs and takes her (stolen) money and gives her a ticket in return.

She is now, officially, a passenger aboard the _Hunter-Gratzner_.

They’ll ship out in two days. She cannot wait.

*

The girl tells the Captain, when he inquires, that her name is Jack.

It’s a spur of the moment decision, one that she hadn’t planned out yet, but it fits somehow.

Her father’s name. Their family’s legacy.

Yes, it certainly does suit her purposes nicely. And at least this way she knows she’ll never forget it. She’ll always turn to look when she hears that name called.

So. There’s that.

 _Jack,_ she thinks, curling up in yet another alley that night, _my name is Jack._

*

She’s only a little nervous when she climbs into the cyro-pod, but a man smiles at her as she fixes her harness securely and she – Jack – forces herself to relax in the padded chair.

This is going to work. This is a good thing she is doing, a smart decision. Safety is within reach.

Air hisses and lights flash and machines beep. The engine rumbles all the way through her bones and absurdly, just as it had been on Hawkins’ ship, it feels like comfort.

Jack sleeps without knowing it and doesn’t dream.


End file.
